Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure - Softcover

Gorman, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679313494 ISBN 13: 9780679313496

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2004

Synopsis

If someone called you a 'googlewhack' what would you do? Would you end up playing table tennis with a nine year old boy in Boston? Would you find yourself in Los Angeles wrangling snakes, or would you go to China to be licked by a performance artist? If your name is Dave Gorman, then all of these things could be true- Fuelled by a lust for life and a desperate desire to do anything except what he's supposed to be doing (writing that novel and growing up), Dave falls under the spell of an obscure internet word game - Googlewhacking. Addicted to the game, and gripped by obsession, Dave travels three times round the world, visiting four continents and the unlikeliest cast of real life eccentrics you'll ever meet in what becomes an epic challenge, a life-changing, globe-trotting Googlewhack adventure. A hostage to the vagaries of a search engine, Dave Gorman has become a 21st century Dice Man throwing his fortune to the fates. The only difference is that the dice Dave rolls has 3 billion faces- 'A rollicking, funny, sometimes disturbing, high-stakes personal journey with the pace of a thriller- Brilliant.' The Melbourne Age

About this title

About the Author:

Dave Gorman is an award-winning comedian, storyteller and writer. He has numerous TV writing credits and was part of the double BAFTA-winning team behind The Mrs Merton Show. His live shows have won many awards and he is the only performer to twice win the Jury Prize for Best One Person Show at the prestigious HBO US Comedy Arts Festival. He was the host of Genius, which ran for three series on Radio 4 and then two series on BBC2. He has appeared in numerous other TV shows, including Absolutely Fabulous, The Frank Skinner Show, Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His documentary film, America Unchained, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Austin Film Festival. His 2013 TV show, Modern Life Is Goodish, made for UKTV's Dave channel, saw him dissecting the foibles of modern life in six hour-long comic performances. It quickly established itself as the channel's most successful original programme that year and a further sixteen episodes have been commissioned for broadcast in 2014 and 2015. His ambition is to one day become a team captain on Call My Bluff. www.davegorman.com

From Booklist:

When he turned 31, British stand-up comic Gorman decided he wanted to be taken seriously, so he landed a contract to write a novel. He took novel writing so seriously he grew a beard. But no matter how he tried, Gorman couldn't actually write anything. One of his procrastination methods was googlewhacking--a game in which the "whacker" types two different words into Google and tries to get exactly one hit. His first googlewhack, "Dork Turnspit," led him to a site featuring photographs of women with dogs. Gorman found the site so fascinating that he met its owner and then asked the women-and-dogs fellow to find him another googlewhack. And so begins one of history's greatest ventures in procrastination. Over the next weeks, Gorman traveled tens of thousands of miles, everywhere from Columbus, Ohio, to Beijing, China, meeting googlewhacks, trying to string together 10 in a row by getting two new googlewhacks from each person he met. The descriptions of place are sometimes trite and obvious, but Gorman's self-deprecating wit and irrational dedication to his quest make this a hilarious travelogue. For more titles in the emerging "idiotic but charming quest" travel genre, see the accompanying Read-alike. John Green
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About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0679313494
• ISBN 13: 9780679313496
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364